Why don't the web pages work properly under Ubuntu?

bliss should work just fine on Ubuntu, but there is one corner case: encrypted home folders.

When bliss runs it stores its files in the home folder. The UI stores working files, that is, it stores cached files used to show the web pages in the home folder. The trouble is that these files can get very long names, and there's a limit of 143 characters in encrypted folders.

This often breaks the bliss's web pages. In particular, you might notice the rule ON/OFF buttons do not work in the Settings page, and the bliss logo is not rendered correctly.

You can work out if you have an encrypted home folder by opening Terminal and typing:

ls -A /home

If an .ecryptfs folder is listed, your home folder is encrypted.

Obviously, you don't want to disable encryption so you can run bliss, so what's the workaround?

It is possible to configure bliss's working location. We create a folder in an unencrypted location (say, /var/cache which is often used for runtime files) and point bliss there:

sudo mkdir /var/cache/bliss
sudo chown $USER:$USER /var/cache/bliss
export VMARGS="-Dbliss_working_directory=/var/cache/bliss"

When you now run the bliss.sh shell script from within the same login/terminal session, bliss will use /var/cache/bliss as its working folder instead.

If you open a new terminal window and run bliss, or you run bliss from the Desktop, then this configuration will not transfer. While the first two lines only need to be done once, to create the directory, the last line needs to be repeated each time bliss starts in a different login context (terminal session).

You can either edit the bliss.sh script to include the above line or add it to your startup scripts in /etc/rc.local or whichever way you choose.